LDOM Configuration Backup

Having Oracle VM for SPARC running is quite a nice thing, but what would happen if you lose your whole box and you have to recover all VMs and LDOM settings… I see two different things to save. The hardware configuration based on the hypervisor settings which are stored on the internal service processor. The second thing would be the virtual settings regarding vdisk or vnet services and constraints.

The worst thing is the hypervisor partitioning setup which is not saved and transferred to the service processor by default/automatic. This ends in a factory-default (or an older saved config) setup if you power off the server and forgot to save it. Had that several times when hardware was changed and after powering on all settings were gone… nice situation 😉

Per default you have the ldmd autorecovery_policy set to 1, which means that warnings are logged into the SMF log file and you have to manually perform any configuration recovery. To be honest, I know no one who monitors the SMF log files… so perhaps an idea to include this file(s)

Setting it to 2 would display a notification message if an autosave configuration is newer. But still you must manually perform any configuration recovery.

root@t7primary02:~# ldm list
Autorecovery Policy is NOTIFY. Autosave configuration, 'foo01', is
newer than the configuration stored in the SP. Use either the ldm add-spconfig -r <cfg> or ldm add-spconfig -r <cfg> <newcfg> command to save the autosave configuration to the SP, and power cycle the system for the updated SP configuration to take effect. The requested command was aborted, reissue your command to perform the operation you intended. No more autosave warning messages will be issued.

With autorecovery_policy = 3 the configuration is updated automatically and would overwrite the SP configuration that will be used during the next powercycle. But the documentation says “thus, you must use the ldm add-spconfig –r command to manually update an existing configuration or create a new one based on the autosave data”

I tried to find a technical reason why this configurations are not stored in an automatic way but to be honest, I have no clue…

Virtual Backup

To save my LDOM settings I use the following:

# ldm list-constraints –x
# ldm list-bindings –e

And mentioned in the Installation Guide you should backup the AutoSave directory “/var/opt/SUNWldm”.

When using SR-IOV for your SAN HBAs always use own WWNs. The random WWNs assigned by the ldom manager cannot be restored. When trying to set the WWN to the old value the manager will say, no, because it is in his own random WWN pool…